Citation File Format
The Citation File Format (CFF) is a human- and machine-readable YAML schema for providing citation metadata for software and datasets in source code repositories. A CITATION.cff file at the root of a repository declares authors, version, DOI, release date, and reference metadata, enabling consistent academic attribution across publishing and discovery platforms. CFF is governed as an open community standard with a published JSON Schema, a guide, and a maintained schema repository on GitHub. Native integrations include GitHub citation display, Zenodo software publishing, and the Zotero browser plugin. Tooling includes cffinit for authoring, cffconvert for conversion to BibTeX/RIS/CodeMeta/EndNote formats, and the cff-validator GitHub Action for CI validation. The current schema version is 1.2.0.
Limited machine-readable signal and partial portal coverage — documentation a human can read, but little a machine or agent can consume without scraping.
API Evangelist profiles Citation File Format the way a machine reads it — 14 machine-readable artifacts across 6 APIs, pulled from the provider's own public surface and indexed so a developer, an analyst, or an AI agent can evaluate it against every other provider on the network.
Every provider in the network is reduced to the same set of machine-readable artifacts — OpenAPI contracts, event specifications, GraphQL schemas, runnable collections, pricing and rate-limit signals, security posture, OAuth scopes, and the agent surfaces (MCP servers and skills) that let software drive the API on its own. We profile them because the interface is the part of a company you can actually inspect: it is a truer signal of what a provider does than any marketing page. From those artifacts we compute the Kin Score — Citation File Format scores 40.5/100 (thin), with a separate agent-readiness read of 7/100 (human only). The full breakdown is below, followed by every artifact we hold — each card links through to its machine-readable definition on apis.io.
Kin Score
This is the API Evangelist rating — a single, repeatable read computed from the artifacts on this page. Green fill is points earned; the red track is points possible, so every bar shows earned-versus-possible at a glance.
Kin Score
How this is scored →scored 2026-07-27 · rubric v0.5
How we profile Citation File Format
Each block below is one kind of artifact we hold for Citation File Format. For each we say what it is and why it earns a place in the profile, then list every one we've indexed — capped at two rows, scroll within the panel for the rest.
APIs 6
Each API is captured as its own OpenAPI definition — every operation, parameter, and response. This is the single most useful machine-readable description of what an API does, and it's what lets us score, lint, mock, and generate against it without asking the provider for anything.
Individual APIs this provider publishes, each with its own machine-readable definition.
Citation File Format Schema
The CFF schema defines the structure of a CITATION.cff file in YAML, including required cff-version, message, and authors fields plus optional version, doi, license, repository-...
cffinit Authoring Tool
cffinit is a web-based form that walks software authors through creating a syntactically and semantically valid CITATION.cff file. It produces downloadable YAML and validates co...
cffconvert
cffconvert is a Python command-line tool and library that converts CITATION.cff files to APA plain text, BibTeX, CodeMeta, EndNote, RIS, schema.org JSON-LD, and Zenodo depositio...
cff-validator GitHub Action
The cff-validator GitHub Action runs schema validation on a repository's CITATION.cff during continuous integration so that malformed or non-compliant citation metadata is caugh...
GitHub Native Citation Support
GitHub natively reads CITATION.cff files and renders a Cite this repository button on the repository landing page that generates BibTeX and APA snippets from the file's metadata.
Zenodo Software Publishing
The GitHub-Zenodo integration uses CITATION.cff metadata when publishing a release as a citable software record. Zenodo assigns a DOI and populates the deposit form from the CFF...
Pricing Plans 1
Pricing is part of the interface. Machine-readable plans tell you what a tier costs and includes before you commit — one of the six things the Kin Score reads for commercial clarity.
Published pricing tiers and plan structures.
Rate Limits 1
Rate limits are the difference between a demo that works and a production integration that doesn't fall over. Publishing them is an operational-transparency signal — and a hard requirement for any agent that plans its own throughput.
Documented rate limits and quota policies.
Citation Cff Rate Limits
RATE LIMITSFinOps 1
Cost, billing, and metering signals let a buyer model the financial operations of an API before it's live. We profile them for the same reason we profile pricing: the money is part of the contract.
Cost, billing, and metering signals for API financial operations.
Citation Cff Finops
FINOPSSemantic Vocabularies 1
JSON-LD contexts give the data shared meaning across APIs. We profile them because semantics are what let a machine reconcile 'customer' here with 'customer' somewhere else.
JSON-LD contexts and semantic vocabularies used across these APIs.
Citation Cff Context
JSON-LDSpectral Rules 2
Governance rulesets we run against this provider's specs — the automated checks behind parts of the score. Profiling them makes the quality bar explicit and re-runnable, not a matter of opinion.
Citation File Format API Rules
SPECTRALCitation File Format API Rules
SPECTRALJSON Schema 1
Standalone JSON Schema definitions describe the data models behind the API. We profile them so the shapes are validatable on their own — useful long after a single request is forgotten.
Standalone JSON Schema definitions for this provider's data models.
Citation File Format (CFF) - Subset Profile
JSON SCHEMASecurity Posture 1
Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals — the evidence that a provider takes security seriously enough to document it. We profile it because you can't govern what you can't see.
Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals.
Resources
Every other property we hold for Citation File Format — documentation, portals, status pages, policies, and corporate surface — grouped by the job it does, following the integrator's arc from getting started to running in production.
Documentation 4
Reference material describing how the API behaves
Design & Contract 2
Pagination, idempotency, versioning, errors, and events
Build 1
SDKs, sample code, and the tooling you integrate with
Access & Security 1
Authentication, authorization, and security posture
Operate 1
Status, limits, changes, and where to get help
Commercial 1
Pricing, plans, and the legal terms of use
Company 1
The organization behind the API
Other 2
Properties that don't map to a standard resource type
← All providers · Data indexed from github.com/api-evangelist/citation-cff · machine-readable index on apis.io